December 31, 2009

I’m taking over my son’s room! Well, not totally, but I’m getting there. He’s in college and while he was home last week he hardly noticed all the quilting material, sewing machines and craft items strewn about! Good thing, huh?

I bought these really cool Deka curtain wires from Ikea in November and I’ve been dying to put them up. I uploaded and printed off a bunch of my Art Journal pages to hang on the wire. Printed them out as 4 x 6 pictures, the dimensions weren’t exact when transferring from my 5 x 8 moleskine. But it was close enough. No sweat! The hard part was working with the wire. Luckily I had my handy-dandy husband to help. He has just about every tool known to man so, drilling, cutting and stud-finding wasn’t a big issue for him…..It’s also good to have a second set of hands to see where you want the 12ft wire to hang.

Above: I have to show you how cool Sue Doodles “Cosmic Dolly” looks here too! I adore her doodles and asked her if I could print off one of her creations. Being the sweetie that she is, she then just emailed the hi-resolution file to me. The only thing missing is her siggie!

What’s great is I get to hang lots of things on this wire! As you can see I’ve got a guitar Christmas ornament up there, in honor of my son allowing me to impose! I’ve put a 2 dollar bill in the line up, for New Year’s Prosperity. A couple of favorite notecards in there as well, too. I have 20 extra hooks to go crazy with in the coming months! Woo-Who!

View from sleeping! No worries, quite harmless if they were to fall on you!

Being that I am such a Visual Person, I love looking at all kinds of things colorful and creative!

How do you display your favorite pieces of art? Do you ever get over stimulated if you put too much stuff up? What inspires you visually?

December 24, 2009

December 22, 2009

Make Bad Art……Make Good Art….Just keep drawing, keep putting pen to paper, playing with your paint, or cutting or pasting or sewing and designing. Just stick with it, thru the empty times, the unproductive pieces, the what am i going to do with this mess work. Keep searching, when you feel like all of your art is going nowhere, just keep plugging along. Cuz you never know when INSPIRATON will strike. How it will strike or what is brewing inside your so called “empty head”.

You just never know, but I believe we must attend to our “art”. We must treat it like we would other lessons we take to improve. You know like piano lessons, swim, tennis lessons. Or even Spanish lessons, we must be diligent, dontchathink? Why do we expect art to be so different? Is it because of all the gifted artists out there? The ones that produce beautiful piece after beautiful piece and don’t ever seem to go stale. But we don’t ever see their practice pages do we? Maybe we should! I think DaVinci has a whole book published just from his notebooks. He practiced and wasn’t he gifted??

The other day, I was wondering why I seem to want to color so much when I can’t even make an original drawing for the life of me. I haven’t taken a drawing class yet, or watercolor or painting class. I really, really want to, but just haven’t found the right one. But no worries, it’ll come when I’m ready!

While feeling so bored and uninspired with myself I stumbled upon a blog that took me over to YouTube. Before I knew it I was watching papparoc46 on YouTube about drawing Keltic Knots…..I was mesmerized and with the visual aid and thankfully the pause button, I could actually figure this out! You’ve got to check out this vlog, it’s so good. I then checked out her vlog about the 10 things she likes about herself (titled My Ten Things). She is hilarious, I couldn’t stop laughing. She’s got a very dry sense of humor that is just charming!

PRACTICE PAGE 1:

I liked only a couple of things on the page; I liked the word “ART” , and the flowers, the square tiles, but I am pretty lousy at swirls, and i have a hard time making anything with pink look good! But pink and blue go together right????

PRACTICE PAGE 2:

I was inspired by this piece on flickr, but my piece just didn’t do it for me. Possibly it was the pink again???? But pink and green go together right??

PRACTICE PAGE 3:

This was a fun page, but it didn’t have any direction to it, it was like a practice piece, like a warm up page for something to happen in my head later, hopefully, maybe, please!!!!

AH-HA moment Page:

For me, I finally got to a piece I like! I made a piece that let me play with my markers, play with my colors and learn something at the same time. I love this piece. Yeah, I know it’s simple, and I know that it has mistakes, but it represents a turning point. That when I get so bored with my drawing, so bored with my color choices that I must just keep observing, keep reading and eventually I’ll hit upon something that excites me. That gives me that “I can’t wait to try this myself” feeling! Oh yeah!

Thanks for stopping by! And letting me tell you my tale of woe this week! And if you can relate to this at all, just keep on doing your thing out there, you just may stumble upon something you like too!

December 12, 2009

I finally got the tree up, and the Santa Quilt, and put out my Christmas decorations. The new Ikea furniture takes up the entire back wall, which was where we usually put the tree. This room has 3 entrances, so we decided to block off the hallway entrance by the basement door. I like it here. I made this Santa Quilt in 04, i think! But I never knew what to do with it. I couldn’t throw it on the back of the couch because the Santa’s would be walking sideways. It’s a rather lightweight quilt so I just thumb-tacked it to the wall. Hey, it was easy, and it works for me, why not? Don’t tell the quilt police though!!! LOL!!

Another view of the tree and of the fireplace! I adore our Christmas stockings and wouldn’t know where to begin to make one of these myself. We have a total of 6 (guess I should’ve had 2 more kids!! ) Four were made by my DH’s sister (2 not shown) and the two in the middle were made by my Great-Aunt. She even knitted the names of the kids at the top!! Talk about talent!!! How in the world do you figure that out????

I obviously have a thing for Nutcrackers! Why? I don’t know, but I have always loved them and to me they symbolize Christmas. I love that there are so many different kinds and designs and nutcracker people out there.

And of course no Christmas decorating would be complete without displaying the reason for the season. Our nativity is completely white and very simple, but I love it.

And these are most of the wrapped pkgs that I must get out into the mail (UPS of course) by Monday. My self-imposed goal. Usually I’m standing in line on the 23rd paying the exuberant fees to mail out packages to our dear families in (Chicago, Pensacola, Newport and Iowa). Not this year!

A couple other hand-made gifts which I adore. The one on the right was made by that same DH’s sister. She used perforated paper and cross-stitched this. There are 2 more ornaments not shown that hang off of the strand that Santa is holding.

And the hallway view of our tree, with a rather pouchy hand-made Santa, made by that same sister-in-law. She can make anything I tell you, Anything!! I like him here, it’s like he’s greeting us!

What Christmas decoration do you find you have a lot of? What Christmas decorations make you smile when you pull them out year after year?

December 11, 2009

To everything there is a season! November was my season to explore drawing more by participating in NaNoJouMo here. It was fun. Some of the art journal pages that I made on my watercolor moleskine, I really liked and was surprised at how they turned out. A few I was disappointed in, but not one of them was a waste. I tried different things with just about every prompt and some of the pages the fault was more in the way I laid out the page. The energy or the eye wasn’t pleased. I had a choice and sometimes it gelled and sometimes it didn’t.

I want to share a story with you that has influenced my thinking in the regard of creating or doing art. I wish I could remember where I heard this little story, when I do I’ll give them credit. Here goes: There was an Art teacher who divided his class into 2 groups. For the first group he told them, “I will grade you on quantity. Yes, quantity, the more pages you give me the higher your grade will be, irregardless of what you do on the pages”. To the second group he told them, “I will grade you on Quality. The better and prettier your work, the higher your grade will be. I want to see the very best you can do”.

Which group do you think turned out the better work? The Quantity group or The Quality group????

I thought it would be the quality group, why wouldn’t it be? They were taking more time, probably using the better materials and measuring everything out and deciding what looked the best. They worked really hard on every single piece. But I was wrong, the group that produced the better work was the Quantity group! The quantity group? How could this be? Well, apparently they didn’t worry about perfection and making everything so pretty and precise. They played, they colored, they painted, they did a ton of trial and error. You see this group learned. They learned as they went along and they got better and better at the task on hand. I also wonder if maybe their ego wasn’t in the way and they were able to silence their inner critique. They enjoyed different media and didn’t get bored with a piece. They were able to experiment.

So, this is my take on “art”……I want to just make stuff. Lots of stuff. All sizes, using many different techniques. Markers, paint, fabric, canvas, photography, decorating, collage, digital art, get your hands dirty art! I better get going, there’s a lot of stuff out there to make :D :D

December 5, 2009

The above quote is: Be a student, learn as long as you still have something to learn. (Free Digital element from Jan Hicks at Scrapgirls last year).

This pretty much sums things up for me lately! I drew these three elves yesterday. I love their hats. There is so much possibility in the hats alone! Just think of the patterns and colors you could draw up there, fun! The blue elf looks to me like he could be related to Porky the Pig. The red elf looks related to the South Park family and by the time I got to the green elf, by leaving his/hers eyes closed she looks the most like an Elf. Ahhh, live and learn… live and learn. I did accomplish one goal. I wanted each set of eyes to have some personality. They do have that don’t they?

I had fun coloring in my elves, but I couldn’t stop there. Next was the background; off I went with my ruler and measured off for my default background of diamonds! But, I may have taken it a little too far! It’s a busy little colorful background. I also wish I had made my Calligra-Fun “Elves” word bigger! It got a little swallowed up! I extracted the 3 elves in photoshop cuz I was curious how they’d look on there own. Ahhh, the wonders of photoshop!

I got my inspiration for the hats from this picture from Pam Carriker.

December 3, 2009

Moving on…..I drew everyday when I was participating in the NaNoJouMo November challenge at www.dblogala.com. But toward the end I couldn’t keep up with the prompts. Bummer! But it was FUN! I must admit I loved following the prompts and thinking up a way to draw or doodle the word. But alas, now it’s over and I must find some other challenge.

This week I signed up for an online class called Calligra-Fun from a very talented lady, Martha Lever . She does beautiful calligraphy with Zig pens, Faber-Castell pens, and LePlume pens. If the pen has a brush at the end then just sit back and watch her magic. She can do loopy letters, swirly letters with a touch of scrolling. Oh to see her alphabet taper! Wow!

I was immediately fascinated when I came across her work. Above is my first flowerpot page with a word that I wrote and embellished per her technique. I have to practice a lot more, and it's a whole-lotta Fun!

About Me

By day...I work in the Healthcare field, where every .. i.. has to be dotted and every ..t.. has to be crossed. This blog is the place where I can let myself go and have some fun.
I am on a journey. A journey I started a long time ago, but
it has been a bit sidetracked with Navy Wife relocations and raising kids. I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel and I have got some time for me. No, I will not be one of those moms walking around the house with Empty Nest Syndrome, I have got way too much to do, to learn, to create. Sure, once the kids are gone I will miss them....but hey, there is always the phone, the email, the texting and the Plane tickets! I love my life and my family and It is fun moving into this new stage.
I am into Digital Scrapbooking, photography, journaling, Art Journaling and Drawing. I am a do-it-yourselfer and I am trying to teach myself to draw. I am finding that it takes a lot of patience, lots of practice and a good eraser!
And if you're really curious there's a 3 part Interview by Eileen:
HERE
All the best,
Eden